Journal of American History, March 2020
Ensuring Poverty: Welfare Reform in Feminist Perspective. By Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. xviii, 220 pp. $49.95.)
Ensuring Poverty is a well-written, deeply researched, yet compact volume analyzing the history and politics of "welfare reform" in the United States through an explicitly feminist lens. Written by two activist scholars, Felicia Kornbluh and Gwendolyn Mink, Ensuring Poverty aims to bring together policy makers and the "feminist academy" to write "policies aimed at poor people" that promote "equality of mothers, especially mothers of color" (pp. xvi, xvii). Explicitly advocating a "social justice" and "intersectional" feminist approach to both historical analysis and antipoverty policy, the book focuses on the origins and consequences of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), which ended the federal entitlement to public assistance and imposed both work requirements and time limits on welfare recipients.
Ensuring Poverty connects the ideas embedded in the PRWORA to postwar U.S. policy and politics. Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council were hardly the first to advocate making "work pay" or ending "welfare as we know it." Indeed, long before the New Democrats rose to prominence in the late 1980s, Franklin D. Roosevelt had promised to "quit this business of relief," and Lyndon B. Johnson had framed his War on Poverty as a "hand up" rather than a "handout." Likewise, the assumption that social policy should be designed to help male breadwinners support their families was central to both the New Deal and the Great Society.
Ensuring Poverty correctly shows how welfare reform is a "women's issue, rooted in intersectional inequalities of race, nativity, and class" (p. xii). For decades, the "male-dominant policy establishment" has used welfare reform to regulate the productive and reproductive lives of women (p. 36). Welfare reformers, both in and out of government, have created a policy and ideological consensus rooted in a shared "squeamishness about women's choices" around such issues as waged work, reproduction, and child rearing (pp. 36-37). Refusing to value poor women's domestic labor, Republicans and Democrats alike have instead insisted on policies tying poor women's wellbeing to the market, to a wage-earning man, or to both. Such policies not only fail to address the root causes of family poverty but also etch "gendered and racialized lines between good and bad citizens" (p. 55).
Ensuring Poverty makes several important contributions to the literature on the U.S. welfare state. With more than fifty pages of footnotes, the text is an invaluable resource for scholars hoping to understand and explore recent welfare history and particularly what happened after the PRWORA. Perhaps most importantly, however, the book calls attention to the grassroots and to the contributions of poor women themselves. As Kornbluh and Mink point out, "major changes in understanding and approach" to U.S. anti-poverty policy have happened only when poor women themselves "authored welfare reform" (p. 41). The text offers tantalizing glimpses of the work done by poor women both before and after the passage of the 1996 law to challenge the elite consensus around welfare reform. Future scholars should go further in excavating and centering the voices of the women-and some men-most directly affected by welfare and its reform.
-Molly Michelmore
Washington and Lee University Lexington, Virginia